China is not, nor has ever been, a major nuclear power. It has a nuclear arsenal about the same size as France and Britain – not even close to the same league as the U.S. and Russia. China practices "minimum deterrence" against the U.S., which means they target about two dozen or less strategic nuclear warheads at the U.S. The essence of deterrence is having a survivable second strike force. Since the Chinese are targeting so few, and they are land-based nuclear warheads (which are fairly easy to track compared to submarine-launched warheads), they are essentially not practicing deterrence against the United States. The U.S. is for all practical purposes capable of a disarming first strike against China.
Well now that they have a right to privacy, at least they'll be protected by Roe v. Wade in case they ever decide to abort an unwanted subsidiary rather than spin it off as an independent corporate person.
As an American, I would expect you to have a better knowledge of WWII history than what you displayed in your post. Turing was important to ULTRA, but all the real work in cracking Enigma was done by a team of three Poles who risked life and limb to escape both the Nazis and the Soviets to get their information to the allies. Without Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Róycki, and Henryk Zygalski, who cracked Enigma back in 1922, the British would have had to start Bletchley Park from scratch.
Let Turing be known as the father of computer science. Credit for cracking the Enigma goes to the Poles.
Perhaps a little less reflexive American-bashing self-righteousness would do you well.
I wrote up a proposal for a passive solution to hiding porn results from the AwesomeBar, much in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the problem of preventing ads from being displayed on websites:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/2/5/43412/24669
Apparently there are already hooks present in Firefox's userChrome that allow the user to specify, on a per URL basis, sites to be prevented from appearing in AwesomeBar results:
http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/hiding-history-with-userchrome
As someone who doesn't carry large amounts of change around, in my car or on my person, I have to say the new parking system does have the big benefit of accepting credit cards. I can pop in my credit card, charge $1.50 and get two hours of parking in Adams Morgan, Washington DC. If I had to pay in quarters every time, I would have to go to the bank regularly to buy $20 rolls of quarters and make sure I was always stocked up before visiting my girlfriend. With the new system, I don't have to worry about anything, except getting the meter paid in the morning before parking enforcement gets to my car...
L'Enfant designed the streets of Washington DC such that an invading or retreating army could easily be cut off by U.S. forces. Unfortunately, the effect has been to cut off the ability of invading and retreating legions of commuters to get to work/home in a reasonable amount of time.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
For fuck's sake, people, the credit card guys haven't actually bought a law concerning hereditary debt slavery yet, and this guy thinks that it is already on the books?
It's already on the books, and has been since Elizabethan England. It's starting to be enforced again, at least it is in Pennsylvania.
The law can force adult children to pay their parents' health-care costs. If Mom and Pop can't pay, you pay. If they have the money but refuse to pay, you pay. If you don't, watch your credit rating sink under the weight of a legal judgment that will haunt you for life.
Don't think debt collectors won't try every possible method to squeeze your money out of you and your family for as long as it takes.
It's probably not a force in the same way that we have the weak, strong, electromagnetic and gravitational forces. My conjecture would be that it's something like light's equivalent of the Bernoulli effect.
Seriously, Wolfram|Alpha crunches the numbers and it's pretty revealing. Pass completion from 1970–present was a team low in 1973, Bradshaw's fourth year on the job. Don't even get me started on his highly inconsistent touchdown pass rate before the late-1970s...
Thankfully I'm not saying that flashy features are more important than technical features. What I'm noting is that insofar as Firefox devs are user-driven, and users primarily care about flashy feature but do not understand and do not care about technical features, then Firefox devs have a very strong pressure to focus on features users care about. They've done a great deal to expand Firefox's marketshare in the face of overwhelming odds (95+% IE dominance backed by Microsoft with mountains of cash and institutional path dependency).
Given the tradeoff between being a 20% browser popular with end users that needs technical work, and being a technically brilliant 1.5% browser popular with geeks (e.g. Chrome) that lacks the standard user-facing features, I think Mozilla would rather have the marketshare+technical problems, rather than the technical brilliance and an insignificant marketshare.
I think the technical problems are very important, and I wish that Mozilla would spend less time and effort integrating features into the browser, when they could very well be implemented by third-parties as extensions. But I understand why their focus is not what geeks would consider optimal.
Frustrating as the self-signed certificate problem may be, I doubt the average email-facebook-nytimes-youtube-pr0n user even knows about the certificate issue, much less cares, much less is willing to switch to another browser over the issue. Again, I think this is an issue where geeks who care passionately about these kind of things confuse themselves for the mass of Firefox's constituents.
No no, I'm arguing that bloat is trivial features, and that technical features that appeal to geeks are not usually user-facing or things that the general mass of users can get excited about. As an analogy, think about Apple's approach to Snow Leopard: there are certainly lots of new features, but most are technical and therefore boring to people who aren't geeks. So they're marketing it as putting a 'pause' on features, simply because there aren't many big UI features that normal end users will get excited about.
Same with Firefox: the end-user features are selling points for the mass of users, whereas technical features are hard for anyone but geeks to get excited about except in an abstract sense. The problem with something like process separation isn't that it's trivial, quite the opposite, it's very hard and this serves as a barrier to spending a great deal of time on a feature that only a very few people will care about. Like it or not, Firefox is still very market-share oriented, whereas Google, developing in secret, didn't have to care about 'featureless' releases hurting market-share.
This is a pretty ungenerous view to take. First off, the Mozilla community is not confined to geeks on Slashdot who care passionately about things like process separation. The Firefox developer community most certainly does care about its users, but the users don't necessarily know that they want, much less could benefit from, process separation. Like Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." So, Firefox developers delivered what the mass base of users wanted. If anything, you might fault them for being overly user-driven. We can see this in their focus on adding new features, instead of leaving the trivial features as extensions and focusing on performance, standards implementation, and technical features like process separation.
Funny thing is, they're already in the middle of a major revision project. After Fx2, Brendan Eich released a set of goals for Mozilla 2. The idea is/was to do a large scale cleanup and refactoring (explicitly not a rewrite, however) in order to get rid of some legacy code still around from overly ambitious plans that didn't pan out (e.g. XPCOM). That was to happen in parallel to the development of Fx3 on Gecko 1.9.0.
It's not clear how much progress has been made on Gecko 2.0—almost no public-facing announcements are made about it to the community, and the wiki page is dormant. All the work and focus seems to have been poured into Gecko 1.9.1 (Fx3.5) and now 1.9.2 (Firefox.next).
One element of Eich's vision for Mozilla 2 was implemented in 3.5 – the new faster javascript implementation. But the smaller, leaner, more approachable codebase goal? Who knows.
Now it seems they're attempting 'Electrolysis' (the codename for process separation) in parallel to the development of Firefox.next (Gecko 1.9.2), which is already ostensibly being done in parallel to the Mozilla 2 refactoring. Makes you wonder if there's anyone at the wheel.
Here's an essay I wrote about Mozilla's direction back in 2007 when Mozilla 2 was supposed to kick off.
Slashdot Mirror
China is not, nor has ever been, a major nuclear power. It has a nuclear arsenal about the same size as France and Britain – not even close to the same league as the U.S. and Russia. China practices "minimum deterrence" against the U.S., which means they target about two dozen or less strategic nuclear warheads at the U.S. The essence of deterrence is having a survivable second strike force. Since the Chinese are targeting so few, and they are land-based nuclear warheads (which are fairly easy to track compared to submarine-launched warheads), they are essentially not practicing deterrence against the United States. The U.S. is for all practical purposes capable of a disarming first strike against China.
For further reading, check out the article "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy" by Lieber and Press in Foreign Affairs 2006.
Can you recommend any good books on non-parametric statistics for people who are not stats or math majors?
I wrote a long essay on this subject over at another (essentially failed) competitor to Slashdot.
I can't believe you repurposed content from my diary on kuro5hin about sybil attacks in order to karma whore yourself out on Slashdot. For shame!
I think you'll find this old Bob Hope movie clip about zombies apropos.
Well now that they have a right to privacy, at least they'll be protected by Roe v. Wade in case they ever decide to abort an unwanted subsidiary rather than spin it off as an independent corporate person.
Bud Light beat Microsoft to the concept of anal sex in advertising.
As an American, I would expect you to have a better knowledge of WWII history than what you displayed in your post. Turing was important to ULTRA, but all the real work in cracking Enigma was done by a team of three Poles who risked life and limb to escape both the Nazis and the Soviets to get their information to the allies. Without Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Róycki, and Henryk Zygalski, who cracked Enigma back in 1922, the British would have had to start Bletchley Park from scratch.
Let Turing be known as the father of computer science. Credit for cracking the Enigma goes to the Poles.
Perhaps a little less reflexive American-bashing self-righteousness would do you well.
Incorrect, Blastard. It says right in your passport that you can renounce your U.S. citizenship. The process is described on this friendly and helpful State Department webpage.
I wrote up a proposal for a passive solution to hiding porn results from the AwesomeBar, much in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the problem of preventing ads from being displayed on websites: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/2/5/43412/24669
Apparently there are already hooks present in Firefox's userChrome that allow the user to specify, on a per URL basis, sites to be prevented from appearing in AwesomeBar results: http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/hiding-history-with-userchrome
As someone who doesn't carry large amounts of change around, in my car or on my person, I have to say the new parking system does have the big benefit of accepting credit cards. I can pop in my credit card, charge $1.50 and get two hours of parking in Adams Morgan, Washington DC. If I had to pay in quarters every time, I would have to go to the bank regularly to buy $20 rolls of quarters and make sure I was always stocked up before visiting my girlfriend. With the new system, I don't have to worry about anything, except getting the meter paid in the morning before parking enforcement gets to my car...
Yeah, but that's not the whole story. Wealthy men give women more orgasms.
L'Enfant designed the streets of Washington DC such that an invading or retreating army could easily be cut off by U.S. forces. Unfortunately, the effect has been to cut off the ability of invading and retreating legions of commuters to get to work/home in a reasonable amount of time.
No, that's nihilists.
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science
It's already on the books, and has been since Elizabethan England. It's starting to be enforced again, at least it is in Pennsylvania.
Don't think debt collectors won't try every possible method to squeeze your money out of you and your family for as long as it takes.
It's probably not a force in the same way that we have the weak, strong, electromagnetic and gravitational forces. My conjecture would be that it's something like light's equivalent of the Bernoulli effect.
Seriously, Wolfram|Alpha crunches the numbers and it's pretty revealing. Pass completion from 1970–present was a team low in 1973, Bradshaw's fourth year on the job. Don't even get me started on his highly inconsistent touchdown pass rate before the late-1970s...
That was super informative, thanks!
Thankfully I'm not saying that flashy features are more important than technical features. What I'm noting is that insofar as Firefox devs are user-driven, and users primarily care about flashy feature but do not understand and do not care about technical features, then Firefox devs have a very strong pressure to focus on features users care about. They've done a great deal to expand Firefox's marketshare in the face of overwhelming odds (95+% IE dominance backed by Microsoft with mountains of cash and institutional path dependency).
Given the tradeoff between being a 20% browser popular with end users that needs technical work, and being a technically brilliant 1.5% browser popular with geeks (e.g. Chrome) that lacks the standard user-facing features, I think Mozilla would rather have the marketshare+technical problems, rather than the technical brilliance and an insignificant marketshare.
I think the technical problems are very important, and I wish that Mozilla would spend less time and effort integrating features into the browser, when they could very well be implemented by third-parties as extensions. But I understand why their focus is not what geeks would consider optimal.
Frustrating as the self-signed certificate problem may be, I doubt the average email-facebook-nytimes-youtube-pr0n user even knows about the certificate issue, much less cares, much less is willing to switch to another browser over the issue. Again, I think this is an issue where geeks who care passionately about these kind of things confuse themselves for the mass of Firefox's constituents.
No no, I'm arguing that bloat is trivial features, and that technical features that appeal to geeks are not usually user-facing or things that the general mass of users can get excited about. As an analogy, think about Apple's approach to Snow Leopard: there are certainly lots of new features, but most are technical and therefore boring to people who aren't geeks. So they're marketing it as putting a 'pause' on features, simply because there aren't many big UI features that normal end users will get excited about.
Same with Firefox: the end-user features are selling points for the mass of users, whereas technical features are hard for anyone but geeks to get excited about except in an abstract sense. The problem with something like process separation isn't that it's trivial, quite the opposite, it's very hard and this serves as a barrier to spending a great deal of time on a feature that only a very few people will care about. Like it or not, Firefox is still very market-share oriented, whereas Google, developing in secret, didn't have to care about 'featureless' releases hurting market-share.
Not sure, but I do know that they've been removing XPCOM where they can throughout the Gecko / Firefox codebase.
Yes, they were. TraceMonkey was started in earnest in early summer 2008. Chrome was (accidentally) announced 1 September 2008.
This is a pretty ungenerous view to take. First off, the Mozilla community is not confined to geeks on Slashdot who care passionately about things like process separation. The Firefox developer community most certainly does care about its users, but the users don't necessarily know that they want, much less could benefit from, process separation. Like Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." So, Firefox developers delivered what the mass base of users wanted. If anything, you might fault them for being overly user-driven. We can see this in their focus on adding new features, instead of leaving the trivial features as extensions and focusing on performance, standards implementation, and technical features like process separation.
Funny thing is, they're already in the middle of a major revision project. After Fx2, Brendan Eich released a set of goals for Mozilla 2. The idea is/was to do a large scale cleanup and refactoring (explicitly not a rewrite, however) in order to get rid of some legacy code still around from overly ambitious plans that didn't pan out (e.g. XPCOM). That was to happen in parallel to the development of Fx3 on Gecko 1.9.0.
It's not clear how much progress has been made on Gecko 2.0—almost no public-facing announcements are made about it to the community, and the wiki page is dormant. All the work and focus seems to have been poured into Gecko 1.9.1 (Fx3.5) and now 1.9.2 (Firefox.next).
One element of Eich's vision for Mozilla 2 was implemented in 3.5 – the new faster javascript implementation. But the smaller, leaner, more approachable codebase goal? Who knows.
Now it seems they're attempting 'Electrolysis' (the codename for process separation) in parallel to the development of Firefox.next (Gecko 1.9.2), which is already ostensibly being done in parallel to the Mozilla 2 refactoring. Makes you wonder if there's anyone at the wheel.
Here's an essay I wrote about Mozilla's direction back in 2007 when Mozilla 2 was supposed to kick off.